Dragon at the City Walls

~Bad Poetry~Pen Brush Sword

Nov. 28

Written By Tiler 'Ti' Bradshaw

Things start to get better quality-wise! Here we have a Dragon...attacking the walls of some fortified structure, and there are knights or soldiers of a sort, diving in headlong to deal with it! There is also fire and some visual tricks that I learned to deploy in situ! The things all generally good, there is clearly a dragon-ass dragon there and it feels big and imposing. Threatening Even! We have a wall with some perspective and variable geometry if you look at it. My knights look like people who are about an explicit purpose. Needless to say, as Bad Poetry goes, I really like this one!

Even today, several years later, I am still happy to look at this painting. It was a sign to me that my potential as an inkborne artist armed with some rudimentary watercolor techniques and dip pens is still capable of achieving greater levels of completeness and competency. Time to explain this, generally.

The idea was just a free-floating thought, I'm somewhat fond of dragons, I may have been neglecting my duties about killing Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight in favor of amusing a weird cat in Darkroot, it's far enough back that I don't recall the precise circumstances of this composition existing. I certainly had been doing my homework on making this idea come to life. Looking at my sketches, you can see that I didn't really change the composition much throughout, and I made an effort to get my shapes and forms right, as well as exploring what kinds of perspective considerations I should maintain throughout.

Point is, I made sure to keep my subjects/objects physically linked throughout the canvas. The soldiers are running along the wall, which doubles back through the page, part of it is destroyed, and there's big ol' dragon waiting there to mess things up for them! The dragon has this cool-looking fire breath spilling from its mouth and this cool-looking fire is blazing up from somewhere below and within the walls with a great plume of smoke that rises up through the scene, but only just obfuscates the great extended wing of this creature, further reinforcing the sense of realization and scale of the great beast.

One interesting thing I learned while making this was with the flames, because I'm using a translucent medium, that can't be erased, you have to follow watercolor rules: light is more important in your planning phases because you can't go lighter, only darker (you should have an idea of how you want to build your composition before you start applying paint); the lightest tonal value you will have on white canvas is places you've not touched (in opaque mediums [oils, acrylics] you can paint white over a thing to functionally 'erase' a thing, which is not possible in standard watercolors).

If you are armed with some white ink, though you can do some cool things like dialing back the progression of values from dark to light (mind, this can't take you back all the way to white, and if saturated and dry, you can't paint on those spots done with white) another odd feature of painting with white ink is that it isn't white. The example on the label of the Windsor & Newton 974 White reveals the dirty secret that it is actually an extremely desaturate cyan, so using this with a brush will actually color your composition somewhat, albeit quite subtly. This strange kind of ink also has other properties that make photographing in certain lighting conditions really special, but I'll showcase that when it becomes appropriate.

This one was a real confidence booster for me, and despite the fact that I was fully intending to use each leaf in this sketchbook, I finally started to see some skill-oriented dividends develop and it allowed me to think about dreaming my ideas without fear of making poorly representative material and start growing as an arts boy.